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Lambsdorff was born in Aachen (Rhineland) to Herbert Graf Lambsdorff and Eva, née von Schmidt. He attended school in Berlin and Brandenburg an der Havel and became an officer cadet in the Wehrmacht in 1944. In April 1945 he was severely wounded in an Allied strafe attack and lost his lower left leg. Lambsdorff was a prisoner of war until 1946. After World War II he passed his Abitur and studied law at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne where he obtained a PhD. In 1951 he became a member of the liberal FDP, and from 1972 to 1998 he represented this party in the Federal Diet, the Bundestag. He was also chairman of the FDP from 1988 until 1993.[1][2]

Within and outside his party he was known as a representative of the market liberals; a mocking name was der Marktgraf ("the market count", a play on Markgraf, "margrave"). From 1977 until 1982, and again from 1982 until 1984, Graf Lambsdorff was the West German Federal Minister of Economics, when he was forced to resign over the Flick Affair. On 16 February 1987, he was convicted by the Bonn State Court of tax evasion.[3][4]

The pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) had been in coalition with the Socialist SPD, it changed direction in the early 1980s.[8] Lambsdorff led the FDP to adopt the market-oriented "Kiel Theses" in 1977; it rejected the Keynesian emphasis on consumer demand, and proposed to reduce social welfare spending, and try to introduce policies to stimulate production and facilitate jobs. Lambsdorff argued that the result would be economic growth, which would itself solve both the social problems and the financial problems. As a consequence switched allegiance to the CDU, and Schmidt lost his parliamentary majority in 1982. For the only time in West Germany's history, the government fell on a vote of no confidence.[9]

Regarding personal names: Graf was a title before 1919, but now is regarded as part of the surname. It is translated as Count. Before the August 1919 abolition of nobility as a legal class, titles preceded the full name when given (Graf Helmuth James von Moltke). Since 1919, these titles, along with any nobiliary prefix (von, zu, etc.), can be used, but are regarded as a dependent part of the surname, and thus come after any given names (Helmuth James Graf von Moltke). Titles and all dependent parts of surnames are ignored in alphabetical sorting. The feminine form is Gräfin.